SSX Blur Hands On Preview

Most large publishers have been struggling to determine the most effective methods to translate their well established properties over to the considerably unconventional Wii. Perhaps surprisingly, the multiplatform-heavy Electronic Arts has gained early notice as one of the larger companies that in the quest to solve this particular puzzle has at least thrown out some decent guesses. The company's gesture-heavy Wii version of Madden 07 was well received--in many cases receiving better reviews than its PS3 and Xbox 360 counterparts--its upcoming Tiger Woods title for the system has received positive early buzz, and it has opened up a development group in Vancouver solely dedicated to producing Wii games. Recently the company announced that its well loved snowboarding franchise SSX would be getting its first outing of the current console generation on the Wii, in the form of SSX Blur by EA Montreal. I recently had the chance to get some hands on time with the game and speak with designer Nick Guerin to get his thoughts on taking the series in a different direction. As with most properties that make their way to Wii, the biggest change to the series with SSX Blur is its control scheme. SSX Blur uses both the Wii remote and the nunchuk, with the nicely tidy concept of mapping all ground control to the nunchuk and all in-air control to the remote. Steering your character is done by tilting the nunchuk in the appropriate direction, with sharper carving achieved by then tilting the nunchuk's analog stick along with the nunchuk itself. To prime your character for a jump, hold down A and then release to go airborne. Once in the air, control switches to the remote. Rather than stringing together a sequence of buttons, you create tricks by actually tilting or moving the remote in ways that roughly correspond to the tricks. Basic trick components include backflips, frontflips, grabs, and spins. Pressing B will attempt to level your character out before landing; this of course won't work if you completely botched it and were too far gone. During my relatively short hands on session, I was able to pull off some combos, but there was clearly more for me to learn in terms of actually recognizing what kind of tricks I wanted to be doing. It is also clear that the EA Montreal team had scaled back some of the more over the top tricks that the series had developed. Curious about this, I asked Guerin whether it was related to the control scheme. "With the way the SSX series was built, each game added a new layer of over the top tricks," he explained. "By [SSX] On Tour all the tricks were insane." Guerin said that the team came to an early decision to scale the tricks back a bit to be somewhat more believable. "It's more fulfilling to do something relatively real than to always be doing a million spins at the push of a button," he continued. "That was a crucial part of the design from the start." Guerin's design notes struck me as similar to those employed by Neversoft with its recent Tony Hawk's Project 8, which toned down some of the excess of the later games in the Tony Hawk series to generally positive response. Speaking of Tony Hawk, Guerin brought up another recent game from the franchise in a control context: the Wii skater/racer Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam, which has frequently been compared to SSX. He noted that after playing the game, he did not feel fully satisfied with the its steering precision, and thought it a shame to discard the nunchuk since it too has its own motion sensor. Both games deal with high speed downhill racing--one on asphalt and one in snow--but they control very differently. Downhill Jam has the player hold the Wii remote like a traditional controller and tilt it left and right to steer. "We realized we needed to use both halves for more control," he said. "We have at least 30 control readings at all times." Despite my early unfamiliarity with the in-air controls, the nunchuk-based ground steering is indeed immediately intuitive and enjoyable. Being able to dig in at a sharper angle with the analog stick is appreciated, and reminiscent of some arcade-style racers, but of course having that analog stick serve as a secondary control is only possible because tilt serves as the primary control, and in that capacity it works extremely well. It's not unwieldy, as one might expect it to be, and at least from my firsthand experience the motion of your own hand seems to map to the on-screen action of your character as well as an analog stick would. "At first I was really reluctant to play with the remote," said Guerin, who unexpectedly explained that SSX Blur actually started out as an Xbox game before moving to Wii, "but now I don't understand how I would ever want to play it with a normal pad." He explained that when the project was in development for Xbox, the team began to start working with effects that were easier to implement on the Wii hardware, and eventually it was determined that for a variety of reasons it made sense for the game to be a Wii exclusive. Said Guerin, "We felt this console was the best for this game, definitely." Series fans will be pleased to know that music will again be dynamically tied to gameplay in SSX Blur, and returns to the funkier sounds of the earlier games rather than the licensed On Tour tracks. Though the four-grade vertical meter on the right side of the screen appears at first glance to be a Tricky combo meter, it's actually now called a Groove meter. As you successfully pull off more and more combos, the meter will fill and its four levels will be achieved. With every new Groove level reached, another layer of intensity is added to the music, the faster paced the tunes and your character become, and the more special tricks are made available. Of course, if you wipe out, you'll kill your progress on the meter. Reaching the highest Groove level will grant access to characters' most elaborate special maneuvers. Uber tricks, as they are known, are performed by tracing simple corresponding patterns with the Wii remote. Asked to compare SSX Blur most strongly with one other game in the series, Guerin chose SSX3, largely for that game's open mountain structure that will be returning in SSX Blur. Blur also puts more emphasis back on the series' original characters, with ten previous personalities returning as player characters and two new ones being added. New to the series is a Slalom mode. Unfortunately I didn't have the opportunity to try Slalom firsthand, but it's easy to imagine it being a good fit to the nunchuk-based control. There is of course also a career mode consisting of a string of tournaments; with the emphasis on SSX characters, there are also various rivalries and alliances that factor into the progression of the story and the in-game dynamics. SSX Blur features a split-screen multiplayer mode, though unfortunate no online multiplayer. There's a also new snowball-throwing mechanic that Guerin claims is particularly well suited to multiplayer modes. "We had to find a way to extract the essence of the game," said Guerin in summing up the team's overall goals with SSX Blur. Indeed, in many ways it's looking to be a return to form for the series, which some veteran fans have been anticipating since SSX On Tour in 2005, but the new Wii-specific control scheme also promises something substantially different. Electronic Arts plans to release EA Montreal's SSX Blur under the EA Sports BIG label on March 16, 2007.